As an avowed atheist living among a sea of believers (both locally and on the Internet), I have spent a lot of time discussing my beliefs (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The purpose of this blog is not to prove the non-existence of God or "de-convert" anybody from their faith, but simply to preserve some of these discussions and allow me to flesh them out through the process of writing them down, as well as to share them with anybody who might be interested in reading them.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Top Ten Misconceptions about Atheists - Part Three

Misconception Number Three -- It Requires More Faith to Be an Atheist than to
Believe in God

No, actually it doesn’t require any faith to be an atheist.All it requires is for you to not believe
that “God did it.”This argument is
usually accompanied by a whole bunch of blather about how ridiculously
improbable it is that our universe came to exist exactly the way it did and
that the only possible explanation is GOD.

I won’t go into all the flaws with
the so-called “argument from design” or the “finely tuned universe” (check out
some of my other blog posts for long-winded discussions on those issues), but
the bottom line is that even if atheists had no explanation whatsoever as to
how the universe came to be the way it is and how we came to be in it, that
still just leads us to a big fat “WE DON’T KNOW” and not “GOD DID IT.”Why God?Why not some as yet undiscovered universal force?Why not a multiverse? Why not aliens?And if God, why YOUR God and not somebody
else’s God (Allah, Vishnu, Odin, Zeus, etc.)?

I get it, though. I really do. Having been there myself once upon a time, I know what it is like to look around the world in wonder and think that it all couldn't have just happened on its own without some sort of intelligence guiding it. And, since we just happen to have this book of scripture describing exactly such an intelligence, and since billions of people believe in that intelligence, and since all my family and friends tell me how important it is to believe in such an intelligence, well, you'd think that believing in such an intelligence is so blindingly obvious that it would take an extreme act of will to actively NOT believe in such an intelligence, right?

Except, all you’re really saying is that,
since you personally (and those you hand around with) cannot understand how it all came to be, it “must” be the
way it was described in the particular ancient text that you personally accept as true,
despite the fact that there are lots of other ancient text that are accepted by
other people that say completely different things. Sure, billions of people believe that the entire universe was created by some sort of God, but they certainly don't all share belief in the same sort of God. Just because you have the Bible and think that proves what you believe to be true, other people have their Koran or Bhagavad Gita or what have you. And to those people, it is just as obvious how the universe was created as it is to you, except that they believe something completely different.

No, it doesn’t take faith to admit ignorance, just honesty.But keep in mind that many of the things that
supposedly “can’t be explained without God” are either wholly specious in the
first place (such as the supposed “finely tuned universe” argument) or else
actually CAN now be explained perfectly well.We don’t know all the answers, and perhaps never will, but we certainly
know a heck of a lot more about the universe now than the desert tribesmen who
wrote scriptures thousands of years ago.